Key takeaways
- AEO aims to have AI assistants name and cite your business in their answers.
- It builds on SEO: the same foundations of crawlable, clear, trusted pages apply.
- Because answers vary, measurement needs several samples and a range.
Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the practice of making your business easy for AI assistants to find, understand and recommend. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for the best provider in your field, AEO is what decides whether your name is in the answer, and whether the description of you is accurate.
Why it matters now
More of the research that used to start in a search box now starts in a conversation with an assistant. The person asking often never visits a results page. If you are not part of the answer, you are not part of the shortlist, however well your pages rank.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO aims to rank your pages in a list of search results. AEO aims to have your business included in a written answer. The destination differs, but the route overlaps: pages that are crawlable, clear, accurate and backed by other trusted sites do well in both.
What do AI assistants look at?
- Pages that answer the question directly, near the top
- Facts that agree across your site and the profiles that describe you
- Independent sources that mention or recommend you
- Structured data that states what a page is about
- What the model learned in training, which only changes when the model is updated
Why one answer is not a measurement
Ask an assistant the same question twice and you may get two different answers. That is why we sample each question several times each week and report the share of answers that name you, with a range. A change that stays inside the range is probably noise.
What AEO is not
It is not a trick. There is no hidden text, special file or magic phrase that makes an assistant recommend you, and anyone who sells one is selling a risk. The work is the unglamorous kind: clear pages, consistent facts, honest mentions.
Where to start
- List the ten questions your best customers ask before they buy
- Ask each one to the main assistants, several times, and record who is named
- Fix the facts about your business that are wrong or inconsistent
- Turn the questions into clear pages that answer them first and explain after
- Repeat weekly and watch the range, not the single number
If you want to see where you stand today, our AI visibility service and the guide to measuring AI search visibility show how we do it.